Word: oddness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...dangerous four-year investigation, police and FBI agents had planted bugs around Mafia hangouts and listened to endless hours of tiresome chatter about horses, cars and point spreads while waiting patiently for incriminating comments. They pressured mobsters into becoming informants. They carefully charted the secret family ties, linking odd bits of evidence to reveal criminal patterns. They helped put numerous mafiosi, one by one and in groups, behind bars. But last week, after a half-century in business, the American Mafia itself finally went on trial...
...psychological tests. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory is indeed one of the oldest, longest and most cumbersome tests in use today. Millions of people in at least 46 countries, from psychotics to normal job seekers to Soviet cosmonauts, have puzzled their way through its seemingly endless array of odd and eerie statements (samples: "Much of the time my head seems to hurt all over"; "My soul sometimes leaves my body"; "In walking, I am very careful to step over sidewalk cracks"). Now, at age 44, the archetypal test is getting a face-lift. "This revision is long overdue," says Kent...
...UNIVERSITY'S ENTIRE approach to protest has been one of disdain. The shantytown in the Yard last semester was looked upon as an odd extracurricular, and last spring's campaign for the Board of Overseers by three self-nominated candidates advocating divestment was viewed as an abomination of tradition. But pretending that there is no dissent and just hoping the protests will go away is not only poor strategy, it is precisely the sort of attitude that makes people so dissatisfied with Harvard in the first place...
...company and building it into an industry giant is the easy part. The real challenge is letting go. Returning CBS Chairman William S. Paley, who turns 85 this month, has long been revered as the nation's most influential broadcast pioneer. But last week's events marked yet another odd, and somehow poignant, twist in the saga of Paley's long, long goodbye...
...ventriloquism, and providing a spotlight for some of the country's best-known professionals." Further, according to Brown and other organizers of the event, the vents (for that is what they call one another) are a little ticked off at being picked on by the press as odd, for theirs is no more odd than a gathering of philatelists. They desire a sober and evenhanded report for once, and so, as far as this department is concerned, they shall have it. The dearth of seriousness in the lines that preceded these is regretfully noted, and the clerk is instructed...